Reasons for a party to form and stay together?

[Sivá]

Ove the last two year or so i wanted to play RPGs again, after a long absence. We tried different games, setups and storytellers/Gms/DMs or whatever. There always was one particular proble that really bugged me. Everybody made their chars for a new campaign and when game actually started it was a pain to bring them together and once they met it was virtually impossible to find any plausible reasons why they'd stay together. Following the cliché they met in some taverne ended up sitting on the same table and stayed together from that time on, even though they had completely different goals and drives.

I guess there was too little communication in the process of creating the chars. Nobody set a common theme for all to follow.

Can more or the less free character generation work, or will it always result with the feeling of watching a bad movie? Are there games that bring together characters of vastly different backgrounds and attitudes and give them coherent reasons to stay together? If so wich ones and how do they do it?

[Eero Tuovinen]

• Agree a priori on how the characters are attached to the game. This is really common in never games. For example, in My Life with Master the fact that the characters are all minions of the same evil master is embedded in the decision to play that particular game in the first place. Therefore there is no need for further rationalizing. Same holds true for Bliss Stage, which I'm currently playing.
• Get rid of the factors that necessitate an unified PC group in the first place. Another campaign game I have going, Acts of Evil, works like this. When PCs do not need to be a group, there is no need for complex maneuvering to get a group together in the fiction. Another example of a game that assumes this is Polaris. (Hee hee, two Czege games and two Lehman games as examples. I'm on a roll.)

Both of the above, as well as many combinations, are rather trivial to implement when you get over it. And by "it" I mean the wrongful GMing advice that suggests that a campaign should be bootstrapped by first creating characters, then creating situation, then inserting the characters into the situation as an unified team via in-character maneuvers. Lose either the team or the need to have characters created outside the situation and the problem disappears completely.

This doesn't even need to be particularly strange in the campaign set-up or have any huge implications for the rest of the game, it's just a matter of getting over a bad habit learned from lord knows where. Consider: instead of starting a fantasy campaign by having one character be a rogue mage on the run and another one be humble guardman to the duke, and the GM spending the next three sessions trying to maneuver the two together and on to an adventure that has nothing to do with the duke or the mage's guild, why not just agree before creating the characters that whatever manner of characters the players create, they promised to each other three years ago that they would meet today in this tavern? They're like, childhood friends, and they all went different ways to see the world and learn of its evils. Now they're back at the Inn of Last Hope, and ready adventure together again. Heck, you could throw in an adventure hook by having one of the childhood friends not appear. Got corrupted by the evil powers and spends all her time riding around on dragons or something. You have a campaign right there and the characters can still be guardsmen or rogue mages or thieving halflings or whatever fits the setting.

See? No need to limit character concepts in any meaningful manner, but no need to painfully justify the PC group, either. If what you want is a healthy team that has in-fiction reason to stay together and work well together, the easiest way to do that is to simply say so and have it already done when the actual game starts. The other option I mentioned above has its merits, too, but I'm not going to sermonize about that. Having a PC group is a necessity for certain kinds of game, while it hampers some other sorts greatly; the issue of the thread probably is not how you might not need to have a group in the first place.

[Vulpinoid]

I'm working on a concept at the moment with a fairly freeform character generation, but with random elements thrown into background generation of the characters.

One of the key aspects is that everyone picks from a set of props (where each prop gives a specific pre-defined background element).

Players don't know what the backgrounds are, but the "feel" of the background is implied in the prop....and each of these background elements link together in a reason why the characters might be working together.

A toy may represent a traumatic moment in someone's childhood. A gun might represent the character killing someone, being framed for killing someone or having a good friend killed. A feather might represent some kind of shamanic beliefs which have lead to persecution of some type.

I actually made the players pick their props and roll other random backgrounds before generating their characters so they'd have something to think about when they were defining their numbers. Once all of their numbers were in place, I told the players that they had been gathered together by someone who knew them all and shared similar goals with them. A La "Charlies Angels" this character will start off the process by giving the characters some missions while remaining in the shadows. In a mediaevil setting, this person could pin cryptic essage on the village noticeboard, or maybe deliver vials of potions which induce collective hallucinations where he tells them the missions.

Once the players realise that they have the same type of goals, and that when they help each other they contribute to their own success, the cohesion in the group should start to take care of itself.

It just a case of being careful to write these backgrounds in such a way that there is a synergy between them.

I tend to offer twice as many background options as there are player, this way everyone gets a decent choice from a range of props. I also try to make sure I don't write backgrounds that specifically indicate a given character type (eg. "This happened...which led to that...and that's why you became a mage." Because this would suck if the player didn't want to run a mage character.)

We ran a character generation session using this idea last night with half of the players having fairly good ideas of what they wanted to play, and the others using the aspects I'd given them to clarify their thoughts. There was only one case when the player didn't really like the way that the random elements fitted together, but I worked through the ideas with her and we devised a coherent back story that made sense with her original concept. It took a bit more work, but that should prove to be one of the mopre interesting characters in the group because of these contradictions and complications.

V

[Sivá]

I picture the following scenario: A couple of teens meet, wanting to play RPG xy. The players aren't entirely sure what they want to play, flip through the core book and everybody finds something to his likeing. There is only very limited interest in wondering about motives and background of a character. The only pictures in the mind of the players are the stereotypes from the race and maybe class descriptions. It's the same mentality you have when you start a computer RPG. Decide race, decide class, tweak some numbers, start to play.

That is the scenario i want to prepare for.

Mabye i'll leave out backgrounds at the beginning of the game alltogether. Then i'd still need to know how to generate coherent reasons to make a party out of incoherent characters. I am a bit unconfortable with letting the GM provide the Background for the players, because it only increases his or her preperation time.

Not sure if i would want to give up the "party" stereotype. I'm curious though how this even works.

[Callan S.]

I picture the following scenario: A couple of teens meet, wanting to play RPG xy. The players aren't entirely sure what they want to play, flip through the core book and everybody finds something to his likeing. There is only very limited interest in wondering about motives and background of a character. The only pictures in the mind of the players are the stereotypes from the race and maybe class descriptions. It's the same mentality you have when you start a computer RPG. Decide race, decide class, tweak some numbers, start to play.

That is the scenario i want to prepare for.

Hi,

I'm just wondering if your not considering any overt changes to that scenario, because you think it might break the dream. Like in Euro's example of my life with master - the game is about you being a minion. I'm wondering whether you think if you do the same (ie, The situation exists for out of game world reason, ie that's what's written in rules) it'll break the dream of the game world.

PS: Dreams a very broad word - so I'm just asking in broad terms at the moment.

[Sivá]

No. During my short stay on this forums, i just began to realize that many of the concepts for RPGs i took for mandatory are really just random ideas that shaped the image of how RPGs are supposed to be. This became especially evident to me, after reading Eeros reply. I had to think for a while where i want to go from there.

There are some fundamental ideas i had, before coming to this forum, that won't change, no matter what. The one that is most important is a metaphysical concept for a very flexible reality. It could be applied to many different kinds of worlds. You probably could build a game upon this concept, without attaching it to a world. Although this idea still has plenty of rough edges, it is developing in my head.

I wanted to create a world, where these metaphysics come alive. I merely choose to settle for a fantasy world, because i love fearies, magic, dragons and the like. The flavour of the fantasy world will simply be based on my taste i guess.

I was also aiming for a strong pseudorealism from the very beginning. The basic concept has the side effect of being a way around mundane in-game considerations like having to think about food and water, wondering where the characters would put all their stuff (in our games it happen often enough that the party needed a cart). What would they do with their horses (if they have any), when they had to climb over a mountain and such inconveniences.

That was the point where i found the forge. For every question i ask, i have these concepts in mind.

After Eeros reply, i considered scrapping many of the assumptions i had about how my game would look like that i never even thought about, that i just took for given. Then i wondered, if i could make it work somehow to use this newly gained knowledge of things that are just assumptions about what RPGs are to the advantage of my game. I pondered what these assumptions are and what people are prepared for, when they play an RPG and i guess it is exactly what they are used to from computer games.

I figured that it would be awsome to find systems that make it possible to delve into a fantasy world, with as little preparation time as computer games are asking for. I want to exploit the state of mind, people are used to from playing computer games (and about all RPGers i know play RPGs on the computer) as a starting point for my game. The idea would be to gradually trick them into using their creativity and imagination. These are qualities computer RPGs don't ask for and considering how much time is spent on them, i don't expect my players to utilize them very much at the beginning. However, i assume they would love to, that is what they are playing fantasy games for in the first place. At least that is something i was looking for. I got always lost in what the games truely offered, wich is mostly killing stuff, leveling up and aquiring treasure.

So in the end, i guess i have to change my first answer (no) to yes. I fear it might break the dream.

[David Berg]

Get rid of the factors that necessitate an unified PC group in the first place

There's a question I've long had about this: when the GM and one player play through something that player's character is doing, and no other player characters are involved, what do the other players do?  Stop playing?  Wait patiently?  Watch and enjoy?  Only the third sounds acceptable to me, and I wonder how it could be made to reliably happen.

Siva, if I am off-topic with this, feel free to cut me off.  I'm guessing it's a relevant practical concern here.

[Vulpinoid]

There's a question I've long had about this: when the GM and one player play through something that player's character is doing, and no other player characters are involved, what do the other players do?  Stop playing?  Wait patiently?  Watch and enjoy?  Only the third sounds acceptable to me, and I wonder how it could be made to reliably happen.

I'd guess this is where narrativist play comes to the rescue.

If you are telling a good enough tale then other players should be spellbound by the developing storylines and looking for the opportunity to weave their own tales into the narrative when their turn comes.

Of course, pushing this too far will only lead to other players getting bored and frustrated while waiting for their turns.

V

[Eero Tuovinen]

There's a question I've long had about this: when the GM and one player play through something that player's character is doing, and no other player characters are involved, what do the other players do?  Stop playing?  Wait patiently?  Watch and enjoy?  Only the third sounds acceptable to me, and I wonder how it could be made to reliably happen.

In the games I've played during the last couple of years, it's usually been either "watch and enjoy" or "participate vicariously". If the play is directed in the sense of everybody knowing what they're doing, and there is some method for giving all the players a fair shake at playing, I find that having to take turns is not that bad. For example, Acts of Evil: the game has a explicit turn structure wherein each player gets just as many turns as every other players. Depending on what the player might do with his turn they take more or less time, but the other players are still entertained: they have means to affect the situation the other player finds himself in, they have stakes in the situation (the game is about cultists who are trying to become gods, but only one of them can, so all players are interested in what the others are doing to succeed) and they know the rules that govern how turns progress; there is no uncertainty about when it's going to be your turn. Rather, it's just like a boardgame in this regard: soon it will be my turn again, and then I get to unleash the next step of my plan.

But really, the important part is that while the characters are apart as actors in the game, the players are together as a cooperative group behind the action. By this I mean that the investment of each player in the process of the game goes deeper than just their own character. When this is true it becomes quite trivial to keep players invested in the proceedings when it is not their turn. Too many traditional games have kinda abrogated on the responsibility to create a functional group of players, instead focusing on giving each player his own character as a talisman to hold and cherish, with no interest left over for the general proceedings of the game.

[Valvorik]

I find "agreement on where we're going" more than "where we've been" is important.

Coming down on the same side of conflicts to be the key ones of campaign, even if not all.

As a DM I put it to players, "why are you all together", getting an answer like, "we're all opposed to the evils of drugs, the menaces arising through tainted dreams perverting sorcerers, and supernatural diseases".

[Larry L.]

Hi Siva. Welcome to the Forge!

I'm wondering if there is a specific group of players you've got in mind, or if you're just trying to come up with something cool enough to "pitch" to as-of-yet undetermined participants.

Maybe you'd like share a bit about those previous games where this issue became a problem?

One thing I would advise strongly against is any attempt to "trick" anybody into playing the game you'd like to play by advertising you'll be playing some other type of game. Aside from being dishonest, it generally leads to bad gaming and resentment. You can read some more about this in You Can't Sneak Up On Mode.

I think some gamers are hesitant to try any kind of gaming that splits up the group of PCs due to previous experience where one or more guys goes off on their own, and meanwhile everything gets boring as snot for everybody else. However, some techniques have been developed for play where the PCs don't have to be together or don't even have to know one another, yet everyone at the table can stay entertained. I can describe two of them if you're open to the idea of abandoning "party" altogether. Or maybe that would stray too much from the topic you want to discuss? Let us know.

[fjj]

Unless you play player vs. player, I don't think you can start a game effectively by everyone bringing their own character to the game. I suggest you put the idea of the epic fantasy campaign on hold for a while and try out some shorter games. Good choices are:

* Contenders
* My Life With Master
* Primetime Adventures

Setting up a one-evening game of each these is manageable and you will learn a lot on how to set up a longer running game that is interesting for everyone involved.

If you afterwards still want to go back to fantasy, consider a game such as Ars Magica. This setup can be player vs. player, but with the additional pressure that a common fear of the outside world forces the Magi to work together from time to time.

[Calithena]

Siva - this is a real issue, but there are ways of dealing with it. Here are the two I've had the most success with:

1) Put a very light constraint on character concept up front. For example, one of my most successful D&D games (post-college) was that all the players (many of whom I'd gone to high school with) had grown up in the same village. They all went off to do their own thing (which meant freedom to be whatever kind of character they wanted) but then the adventures started with a homecoming festival several years later (the thief back from the big city, the wizard having finished his apprenticeship, the priestess having stayed the whole time and having become the new village priestess, etc.). Ignoring the real-life parallels my group was enjoying in the core game, something like this can work.

2) This method is harder but can be OK too. Basically, just have everyone start separately being whatever they want, and then have the party gradually assemble along their own path. This is kind of railroading (but if the assumption is party play, you need to get them together somehow, and they'll have the freedom to act as a group later) but it actually works pretty well for me, because everyone has gotten individually tied in to the larger 'adventure' by the time they're all together, and it introduces cool subplots (this guy's on the run, this lady's looking for a magic sword her mother lost, whatever) that enrich the later action sequences immeasurably. The downside is that the GM has more work, since for say a 6 player group you'll likely have to use scene framing to jump back and forth and come up with 3-6 miniadventures (usually some of the PCs can be paired with each other) to tie them into the later stuff.

Eero's approaches are fine too, but if you want to do everything 'in character' in the traditional way those are the two that have worked best for me.

[shadowcourt]

Siva,

This is a topic that frequently comes up with my gaming group. There are a lot of veteran gamers there, who have the "party instinct" built into them, and there's some real incentive around any gaming table, where we have a limited amount of play time a week, to have as much "screen time" for every character as possible. My gaming group is predominantly people in their 30's, and they're interested in gaming, but they want to make sure the 2-6 hours they can devote during a week are satisfying, not just for themselves, but their fellow players. The fact is that one player can easily take up an hour pursuing a plot or series of scenes which are important to them, so there's some real benefit to making sure that those scenes include, in one way or another, as many players around the table as possible.

To this end, I've seen a number of useful, pragmatic strategies work around a table to make the "party" element of a game develop naturally. I'm always a believer in both "top down" and "bottom up" strategies--the best techniques are supported both by the way we play as players AND the nature of the story and the characters as they develop. Here are some things I've seen work well.

1.) It's a Small World After All
One in-story method to use is to consider the relative size of medieval settlements, which are the traditional setting for the sword-and-sorcery genre we're discussing. It was fairly common for most people to know, or at least know of, everyone else. Communities were tiny, people were connected by living family, friends, dead ancestors, and trade in a complex network of employment, marriage, kinship, and simply living near each other. Is it possible that the castle guard grew up in the house next door to the blacksmith's apprentice? It's more than possible, its quite likely. Might you have a relative or childhood friend who is working as an alchemist, a tanner, a seneschal, a scribe, or anything else? Undoubtedly. Simply encouraging players to think about themselves as members of a community, and how they're connected to it, can not only be a great way to link to their fellow players, but it can immerse them in the setting you're playing in and give them real motivations for doing the things they do, beyond "We want treasure/we like power." What if that treasure they're crawling around in dungeons for is intended to purchase the services of a healer to help someone's ailing grandmother? What if the gems found in the dragon's hoard are going to serve as a wedding present for their cousin? And what if the quest for the magical sword is actually a desire to reclaim the weapon wielded by your heroic great-grandfather?

2.) Turn To Your Left, Turn To Your Right
This works with, or instead of, the community model described above. It's a relatively simple exercise. Look around the table where your players are seated, and ask them if they're comfortable with the people sitting next to them as having connections through their characters. There might be some small amount of shifting necessary, but often it works well particularly if the players don't know each other that well. Now, using the seating positions they're in, tell each player that they need to establish, during character generation, a link between their character and the character to their right, and the character to their left.

My personal advice from trying this before is to have these relationships be explicit, and known to both characters before play starts. It's all well and good, and sounds very dramatically exciting, to have two characters be separated at birth, but if only the players know it, it has a decent shot at never coming up in game and never being relevant to the story or the way those characters interact. If players insist on that sort of connection being what they really want, get them to commit to an early in-game revelation, either on their own part or delivered by one of your NPC's. Perhaps they are literally identical twins, and are shocked when they meet each other in the market square. Having two players who share some sort of secret can be useful to an extent, but you do much better with childhood friends, friendly rivalries, shared pasts (i.e. old war-time buddies, ex-lovers, both jilted paramours of the same girl), shared apprenticeships or trainings, family bonds (characters are cousins, siblings, step-siblings, or even parent and child, for some REALLY exciting character interaction!), and the like. Mutual enemies aren't bad, but you'd be surprised how it doesn't provide quite the same "ooomph!" when the enemy isn't on stage, and even when he is.

3.) Relationships From a Hat
A variant on the ideas discussed above, this works well if you're concerned that your players are too new to the whole "collaborative gaming" idea, and aren't sure how to form relationships in the free-form methods described above. In this case, you write a whole bunch of relationship ideas on index cards, and put them in a hat. Each player will draw one of these relationship cards, and apply it to their character and the character sitting to their right. I recommend you make these fairly broad, but provide interesting suggestions. Avoid anything which is going to lead to childishness; not every group is ready to have "You are ex-lovers" on a card given to two male players, for instance, though some groups will love that and run far with it. But, things like the following can work for building exciting linkages:

A SHARED CRIME
The two of you did something illegal, immoral, or against some ruling body, and you're both involved. Are you revolutionaries? Did you conduct a heist together? Are you thrill-seekers or troublemakers? How are you still related? Are you on the run? Are you members of the same gang? What motivated you to commit this crime?

Detail what the crime was, whether you succeeded at your goals (maybe you broke into the prime minister's house, but didn't find the documents you needed before you were chased off; the crime's been committed, but you don't have the goods yet), and where this leaves you now.

or, for an alternate idea...

RIVALRY
The two of you know each other of old, and have been on a long-standing quest to prove who's the best. You might practice similar styles (perhaps you're both warriors), or simply see the other person's techniques as inferior, barbaric, or a waste (say, if one of you is a silver-tongued diplomat and the other a wizard). How does your rivalry manifest? Where did you first meet? Do you two bet on who wins each time, or exchange money, or even a "trophy" of some kind? Is the rivalry friendly, or bitter?

Detail some elements of your rivalry, think about at least one time each of you bested the other one, agree on the details, and describe it to the GM.

or this one, which has often been a lot of fun...

THE OLD HANG-OUT
There's a place where the two of you like to go--somewhere where you feel safe, and everyone knows you and treats you well. This could be the classic fantasy staple of the tavern, but if that's the case, the bartender knows you by name and always has your drink and meal ready for you, and the regulars sometimes come to you for help or with friendly advice or rumors.

Feel free to get more creative, however. Perhaps your hang-out is a well in the market square, a shop or auction house, a guild-house, a temple, a fencing school, a playhouse or theater, a wizard's tower or a university library, a brothel or criminal market, or something more interesting than the above.

Designate the place, and each of you should tell us about the regulars who are there, including at least one memorable staff member. Think about something useful this place does for you--cheap drinks, local gossip, free meals, reduced prices on scrolls, introductions to important people when you need them, or training which helps you accomplish your goals. Tell us what section of the city its in, give it a name, and perhaps a memorable feature or two. Tell us what the two of you do when you're there together-- do you gamble, drink, eat, gossip, or watch the entertainment? Come up with at least one story about the two of you spending time there together--a bar fight is the classic example, with the two of you fighting together, back to back, but odds are you've got another idea in mind. Tell us about it.

Not everyone is going to be thrilled with their connection cards. You might offer them an opportunity to trade around the table, draw a second time, or even to switch who's sitting to their right, as long as everyone feels good about it and it seems likely to promote good game play and no hard feelings.

Not every player is ready for this kind of thing, either. One way to make these a little more appealing is to provide incentives, written on the card. For instance, in a traditional D&D-style game, I might offer the characters who drew "A SHARED CRIME" some incentive like access to a criminal guild/revolutionary organization or contacts in the underworld, a cool item which they'd stolen (say a magical treasure, or a spellbook, or something handy), or just the cash reward for doing the dirty work they did. To the characters who have the "RIVALRY" card, I might even provide some minor character bonuses, to keep the rivalry lively. Perhaps the trophy they trade back and forth is a magical item which the GM provides to them, as an incentive to keep competing. Or, in the case of wildly different characters, you might even the differences between them by providing minor skill bonuses or cool effects (a few extra skill points, say, but only to devote to the skills where your rival is best and you are weakest, making for a colorful warrior who knows some things about esoteric magic, and a spellcaster who has a handle on diplomacy he wouldn't otherwise have). "THE OLD HANG-OUT" option is pretty self-evident: you can reduce prices on goods or services, give them away for free, or offer special options appropriate to the game (refreshing of bonus dice, special pools of power or spells per day) or offer healing.

In each case, these incentives make the players want to utilize the cool free stuff they got, and they do that by interacting with each other.


Those are just some examples of very simple things you can do around a gaming table, right at a character generation session, to make people feel more comfortable with a party, and to make it have an in-game cohesion and sensibility that encourages good role-playing, fits into the world in a logical way, and promotes interacting with the world dramatically.

I hope that helps. Let me know if you want some other suggestions, as there are plenty of other techniques, or variants on the ones above. I can show you some other examples of relationship cards I've used in the past, as well.

-shadowcourt (aka josh)

[arthurtuxedo]

This is one of the areas where the short campaign model shines. By short campaign model, I mean that instead of having characters that go on a series of unconnected adventures together, you tell a single story with an ending that typically lasts 5-20 sessions. If you really like the characters, you can always segue into another short campaign. It's not difficult to sweep a group of people together into a chain of events. It's a lot harder to justify a bunch of random strangers wandering aimlessly around the countryside exploring dungeons and rescuing princesses together.